Reviews by OtisTDog

One of the reasons that I don't often play choice games is that it rarely feels like the choices available are about directiy controlling the character that you're playing. The options often clearly have significance in terms of impact on the unwinding plot, but it can feel more like the old CYOA books than interactive fiction.

You're a Time Agent! neatly avoids that by having the choices matter on an almost second-to-second basis. As a "time agent" of unspecified provenance, you are tasked with infiltrating a facility of unspecified importance. Your obstacle is a door guard, and the puzzle is essentially one of social engineering aided by the supernatural ability to retain information from alternate futures.

Author Tabitha O'Connell overtly undermines the "hey, wow - time powers!" aspect of the game with an introduction which promises that gameplay will consist of "f*cking around" in time. Still, even though the scenario doesn't have much scale, it's surprisingly compelling. As the player-stand-in protagonist tries various gambits, minute bits of information will be pried loose from the stony-faced guard, and these begin to create new options to try.

As manonamora notes, the choice links are conveniently color-coded to indicate when they have been "played out." This is a wonderful nod to the player experience that heads off the most likely source of frustration for the format of the gameplay. Various branches of the timeline offer silly "achievements" that are tallied and listed once success has been achieved.

What's most fascinating to me about this work is the way that it manages to turn the scenario into a fairly mundane experience that feels like "just another day at the office" for the titular time agent. That's not criticism -- that's praise for the author's skill; it would be very easy to make this premise either too silly or too boring to recommend, but instead it's a bite-sized mini-adventure that engages without resorting to the most typical styles of glamor. As one repeatedly rewinds to try again, the guard, initially presented a stock villain, begins to soften and become a person as various peeks behind the professional mask are obtained. (Spoiler - click to show)In one branch he even gives you $50 for dry cleaning, motivated by sympathy for a stranger on the street. He, too, is having just another day at the office.

I've only gotten one ending (so far!), but I'd definitely recommend this "amuse-cerveau" as an enjoyable short experience.

Emily Short's masterpiece is widely considered to be the Greatest Work of IF of All Time. This is reflected in its very secure #1 spot in the IFDB Top 100 list and its continual appearance among the topmost slots of every quadrennial Interactive Fiction Top 50 of All Time since its release (having placed 3rd in the 2015 edition and 1st in the following 2019 and 2023 editions).

It is undeniably fun to play with the semiotic manipulation technology (one of those advanced technologies that are indistinguishable from magic), and the inventive exercise of the various combinations of changes in the puzzle design makes for a "just right" feel of challenge almost universally throughout the game. The task for the player is constrained enough that finding a solution is almost inevitable, but unique enough to make each solution feel like a surprising breakthrough intuition. I once saw someone describe the essence of good puzzle design as "making the player feel smart," and it's hard to imagine a better recipe for doing so using "reasonably easy but not boring" puzzles.

In addition to sporting very enjoyable puzzles, Counterfeit Monkey's narrative earns consideration as literature by exploring questions that seem even more relevant today than they were when it was released. Its indirect commentary on the nature of language and its interaction with reality, and especially how that interaction is relevant to politics, is the work's thought-provoking philosophical core.

Short's tremendous worldbuilding skills are put to the test by this work's scope, but, as Edward Lacey's early review points out, she does a remarkable job of inventing a plausible-feeling world in which this technology exists but which is somehow not too different from our own. The pacing of the complex exposition is slow enough that significant questions will linger in the player's mind for some time, but by the end of the game those questions will have been answered.

Viewed through the lens of conventional storytelling, the resolution of the narrative comes off as strangely incomplete; the three most significant characters (Spoiler - click to show)(Andra, Alex and Brock) all seem unexpectedly subdued about the radical rearrangement of their relationships with respect to each other -- my impression on completing the game was that they are in shock at the story's conclusion, not yet ready to acknowledge the scale of the inevitable changes to their respective status quos. The outcome of the greater political situation also seems a bit too pat, in that (Spoiler - click to show)the new Atlantida seems too insubstantial to hang any hope upon; surely there were other people involved in the government with a vested interest in the way things were and who will look to "reset" the embodied spirit of the country in their own image posthaste. Still, the dramatic questions of the ostensible plot have been resolved (Spoiler - click to show)(if in a manner that looks like failure to the player), so perhaps the remaining questions are springboards for their own stories. (... and note that, for anyone brave enough to try, the game was published under a CC-BY-SA license, so the way is open.)

Short did consciously make the moral climax of the player character's story into a "no-win situation," citing it as "an illustration of one of the core problems of democratic society," and (per the same source) was clearly aware that she was leaving the items outlined in the previous paragraph unresolved. As such, we can be fairly certain that Counterfeit Monkey is telling exactly the story that she wanted to tell, in exactly the way that she wanted to tell it.

I have spent a lot of time thinking about why this work left me a little disappointed. At first I thought that it was just the familiar result of exploring a work that is surrounded by hype and finding that it didn't live up to my expectations, but I later realized that that's not the case here. It actually exceeded my expectations as a game -- it is such a high level of craft that it pegs the needle of my ability to discern things to appreciate; doubtless there is much genius embedded in this work's coding and storytelling technique that escapes my notice entirely by virtue of being off the scale. What I can see is that this work perfects many of the signature elements of Short's style (e.g. conversations, creating a "living" setting, thematic puzzle design) and is truly a masterwork in terms of game design.

What disappoints me is the story side, and the reason is that I was convinced for structural reasons that a different story was being told.

(Spoiler - click to show)
The story that is actually being told is about the intersecting character arcs of Andra and Alex. The situation is such that each perceives a zero-sum game, but in actuality there is a wider range of possible outcomes including negative-sum (as is actually observed in the ending) and possibly positive-sum (as is hinted but not realizable). Each character acts in accordance with his or her own values and priorities, and certain choices -- including the functional climax choice of whom to release from storage -- are between mutually exclusive options that can satisfy only one of the two.

The structure of the work makes me believe that Short was trying to create a genuine tragedy, i.e. a story in which the "right" choices from the perspective of the actors in the story results in a "wrong" outcome from the perspective of the audience. The key evidence here is that the player must make the climax choice without being able to anticipate the resulting consequences. I scratched my head for a long time about this design element, because as a player of even the most interactive of fiction I feel more like a member of the audience than a genuine actor in the story -- an almost inescapable side-effect of the fact the available actions are always constrained by the finite nature of the embodying program. The design around the story climax did not seem consistent with Short's normal style, but it makes sense as a deliberate choice if the intent was to simulate being the actor in a tragedy, i.e. not knowing what the audience knows.

In fact, the "audience" does know the most important and impactful fact affecting the personal drama between Andra and Alex, which is that there is a time limit of unknown length after which their temporary fusion will become permanent. It is clear that neither Andra nor Alex want this outcome, but the game makes it easy to forget this and to ignore that ticking clock in favor of having fun in the moment. (Who doesn't delight in discovering the untalented naval polecat?) Upon reaching the ending, I, too, was in shock alongside the main characters. Like many, I tried different ways to reach the winning state that I assumed must exist, only to later discover that it simply is not provided.

This story doesn't feel like a tragedy to me, it feels only like a bummer ending to an otherwise extremely fun game. (Tellingly, most of Counterfeit Monkey's effusive reviews tend to ignore the endings entirely.) I credit an excellent essay by Drew Cook for elucidating various aspects of tragedies that are essential but which are not provided here. The key quote from the essay sums it up: "Through tragedy, capricious disaster becomes comprehensible and–rather optimistically–a step on a path toward social harmony and cohesion." Among the available endings for Counterfeit Monkey, I felt only the capricious disaster; there seems to be nothing to learn.

Maybe that's not actually true. Maybe the deep message is that we are supposed to keenly observe how the limited perspectives of Andra and Alex make them focus on their short-term conflicts about items of lesser importance to their what-should-be-evitable mutual detriment. The fact that Short ultimately let the structural requirements of a tragic story outweigh the structural requirements of a fun game shows what her priorities were as the author, and this aspect of the work as a whole is good evidence that she was trying to craft something more than "just a game," i.e. entertainment alone.

Until near the end, the story that I felt sure was being told was one about a society whose authority figures have grown unresponsive to its citizenry, and which is on the verge of rediscovering what "democracy" really means. A society in which the power to manipulate symbols is equivalent to the ability to manipulate reality itself. A society whose increasingly authoritarian government knows that its ability to define the symbols is the basis of its control over the populace. Given the background of discontent and the "showdown" scene between a crowd of protesters and a policeman -- a scene so perfectly placed as the climax of an Act II, the resolution of which raises the dramatic tension of the societal conflict that has constantly threatened to break into the foreground -- given that setup, I fully expected the actual climax of the story to be one in which the masses descend on the Bureau's headquarters, interrupting the protagonists' escape plot but allowing the player to use the knowledge gained earlier to tip the balance one way or the other... perhaps at the willfully-paid cost of giving up the chance to reverse the corporal fusion.

As it is, the showdown scene is not foreshadowing, it's just a wonderful study in miniature of the highest potential of IF: a point at which everything that the player has experienced so far begins to resonate with a thrilling emotional and cognitive power so rarely reached in the form. (I personally haven't been so enthralled since "The Puzzle" of Spider and Web.)


Is this Short's best work? As a game, yes, undoubtedly. Counterfeit Monkey is a brilliant resolution of the archetypal conflict between narrative and crossword through skillful synthesis into something more than the sum of its parts -- with a clever meta-wordplay twist, to boot.

As art, though, I'm not so sure, and since it's not just a game, I can't rate it on that basis alone -- I have to take into account the story side at least as much.

My playing group spent a good month talking about this work, debating about the core message(s) it presents. One member was almost 100% on the author's wavelength and laid out an analysis that turned out to be very well supported by Short's own self-commentary when we got to the point of doing research instead of just comparing perceptions. Thus, it seems likely that the narrative part is a complete artistic success for a substantial portion of the audience.

Perhaps the shortfall that I perceive only seems important because the game part is so masterfully done that it comes off (very deceptively) as having been effortless to produce. As other reviewers note, it is an amazing gift to the public for Short to have released this work, her magnum opus, for free, and I don't want to be unappreciative here -- I had a lot of fun playing it, and you will, too. I just can't help but think that there was a missed opportunity to discuss larger aspects of society, aspects that I would have loved to see Short's particular genius explore in more detail -- indeed, aspects that were clearly part of her thought process while creating this work! -- and that doing so would have raised the artistic value of the result considerably. My gut instinct is that this could have been enduring literature of a quality comparable to Ursula K. LeGuin's best if themes about language and its impact on society had been the primary focus instead of just a prominent element. Even though Counterfeit Monkey as a game is an as-yet-incomparable synthesis of narrative and crossword puzzle, it seems to me that there are still greater heights to be reached by interactive fiction -- heights that, if they are ever attained, will be so in part because Emily Short with this work pointed the way.

My natural inclination is to go with 4 stars in acknowledgement of what Counterfeit Monkey might have been, but by the standards of my published rubric there is no doubt that, as a work which is "so incredible it effectively defines the genre or technique that it introduces or perfects," 5 stars are deserved for being the pinnacle of the wordplay puzzler. Kudos to Ms. Short, and thank you.

This is a pretty solidly-implemented short scenario using Inform 6 with the PunyInform library. It has 4500 lines of well-organized source code, which is available for download, and which demonstrates some advanced techniques such as use of a third noun. The PunyInform library has evolved significantly since the version used here (which is 2.4), however, so be advised that some changes may be necessary if adapting the code for your own use.

The review by MathBrush highlights the finicky nature of some parts of the interaction, which significantly detracts from the player experience. In addition to the strict requirements for phrasing, there are certain places in which the game provides feedback that teaches the player the wrong thing. Later in the game, this can be a problem where, as Mark Twain might put it, what interferes with your progress is not what you don't know but what you know that "just ain't so."

A couple of examples of this spring to mind. First, in the opening room: (Spoiler - click to show)There is a mouse hole. The protagonist, though expected to risk the anger of bloodthirsty pirates in the course of reaching the best ending, is too afraid to >SEARCH or >REACH INTO this hole. The >EXAMINE text for the hole implies that it's too dark to see into, but if a lit lamp is available, then a fresh >EXAMINE will discover something inside the hole. However, the >SEARCH and >REACH INTO commands don't change their behavior in response to light, and this seems a bit cruel, especially in the case of >SEARCH (which implicitly involves examining). Second, on the pirate ship: (Spoiler - click to show)While it is strongly hinted that the PC must create a diversion, it's up to the player to figure out how to do this. The correct solution, which involves (Spoiler - click to show)>BURN PILE OF STRAW after relocating it, might be fine if it weren't for a similar object (in the first room) which can't be moved. It's a case where the player being attentive to the game's feedback works against the player's understanding of the game world -- personally, I would think that the first room object was the more portable of the two in the absence of more information. More importantly, there is an opportunity to (Spoiler - click to show)>CUT ROPES which would seem more than satisfactory to create a diversion and would make use of an available inventory item, but for which no response is programmed.

I know that author Garry Francis is a champion of the old school style, and I still regard this game favorably in general, but its design ignores decades of genuine advances in puzzle craft and interaction technique. What essentials would have been lost by a "merciful" design (per the Zarfian scale) for the warehouse sequence, or by having the NPCs be a little less obviously keyword automatons? (Spoiler - click to show)(Harold never even gets up off the floor of the bar even while answering the PC's questions at length, and shows less life than Samuel, who believably passes out after drinking too much of the rum the PC gives him.) Why the occasional attention to admirably small details such as non-essential pieces of the pirate ship, and the presence of some descriptions of smells and sounds, but only about a dozen conversation topics per NPC? (Spoiler - click to show)(On review of the source code, the most talkative NPC -- in terms of available responses -- on land turns out to be Jerome, instead of Harold or Isaac, which surprised me because he seems the least important of the three.)

I'm going with 2 stars on this one because I think Captain Cutter's Treasure has potential that it hasn't quite reached. It really wouldn't have taken much to cross the threshold into 3-star (i.e. "good") territory, some of the items mentioned above would go a long way, and even doubling the topic count (about a dozen responses each) for NPCs and doing other things to add a touch of realism would make the protagonist's situation more convincing.

From the first line, Mud Warriors reads as a gritty war novel. One could call this a stylistic parody, but that description doesn't quite hang right because it's not just imitation for comedic effect.

As the player begins to move through the scenario, the first reaction is pure amusement at the ironic contrast between the style and tone of the prose and the actual setting of the story. It may feel like reading All Quiet on the Western Front or Heart of Darkness, but it's just kids having some after-school fun in the mud... isn't it?

No... not really, no. As the protagonist encounters various teammates and opponents in this crayon doodle of a war, there are story beats that -- if one calls to mind one's worldview from the grade school era -- are actual tragedies at the scale appreciable during childhood: friendships damaged or destroyed, enemies made, promises broken, hopes dashed, seeds of cynicism strewn.

Each of the "warriors" is "playing" the "game" for different reasons. Some are confused but do not question the implicit rightness of anything that they are told is a rule. Some take advantage of the opportunity to unleash aggression without censure or punishment. Some remain eager as ever to please those in charge and accept the sudden change of what defines normal without a second thought, no doubt assuming that any dissonance they feel is a personal problem.

Two figures linger at the edges of the consensus reality shared by all of the other children. The first is the Oracle, a proto-adult, "the archetype of womanhood," whom the protagonist dimly senses has crossed some important threshold and now lives on a plane that he has not yet reached. Her small demesne constitutes a separate universe, one where rules are fluid and deeper principles rein. Already, she understands that some truths are too terrible to be contained in mere words and must be perceived directly to be accepted. She waits patiently and does what she can to help one person at a time, keeper of the bridge between the "living" and the "dead." One wonders: Is she part of the system of rules being imposed, or is she a spontaneous reaction against them?

The second is her functional opposite, "Mike the After-School Supervisor," the only grown-up appearing in the work. He is a figure granted authority by the children but wholly disinterested in fulfilling the responsibilities that he has ostensibly taken on. He sits "cross-legged" on his "spotless" bench, "keeping an eye on the war he’s engineered," a kind of anti-Buddha whose main concern seems to be interacting with his charges as little as possible. (In the wonderful GameBoy adaptation of this work, Mike's attention oscillates between self-congratulation and making a quick buck on the distress that he is packaging as fun. Since that version received the active assistance of author Ryan Veeder, I'm assuming that this characterization is intended to be canonical.)

It is so very poignant that the protagonist seems to consider it simply unthinkable to do anything that would break the rules set by Mike, when it's completely clear to the grown-up player that these rules exist solely for the microcosmic ruler's convenience and benefit. The protagonist understands that something is wrong about the game that he's being compelled to play, but he literally can't conceive the true nature of the causes of his plight.

I asked someone with a PhD in English literature how best to describe Veeder's core narrative device here in technical terms, and it wasn't easy to come up with anything succinct. The irony of the parodic prose style is itself deployed to ironic effect when the story turns out not to be entirely ironic, after all. Does one call this double irony, ironic irony, perhaps meta-irony? I don't know, I just know that I went from laughing about this work to frowning thoughtfully about it. And that the next day, compelled to go through it in detail, I began to feel a bit of awe at Veeder's subtle, dextrous -- even surgical -- skill in crafting it.

There's a long-standing joke about Shakespeare being overrated: "It's just a bunch of moldy old quotes and worn-out cliche." The joke, of course, is that these "old quotes" and cliches originated with Shakespeare in the first place -- it's their genius that has caused them to echo through the ages and be endlessly recycled in lesser works.

Playing Christminster today, it can indeed seem overrated. It's very hard to appreciate how amazing it was in its original context for someone who wasn't there, and because the game had such an impact on the form -- its best ideas diffusing out to redefine the ideal -- most of its achievements are easy to take for granted, if they're even noticed at all.

I had tried this game several times in the past and always put it aside after 20 minutes or so of absolutely zero progress. This time I was determined to get somewhere so eventually broke down and used hints. It felt like pulling teeth to get to the first important solution even then; there are 10 separate hints regarding the critical initial puzzle (fully 22% of all hints provided by the game). When the nature of the puzzle became clear, I found myself swearing out loud.

I went on to finish the game, sometimes running into more brick walls that exacerbated my grumpiness, but in between bouts of that I started to notice some of the work's cleverest parts. After finishing, I prepared a somewhat scathing review enumerating the game's many deficits. It wasn't until I reviewed the varied commentary on the game available from its IFDB page -- and dissected its source for fact-checking purposes -- that I started to have a change of heart. I had expected to find discussion of its flaws, but instead I encountered praise for its innovations in terms of NPC design, puzzle fairness, and story integration.

Before continuing, I am forced to acknowledge is that this is a very well-developed work by the standards of its time, and that it hails from the earliest days of the hobbyist era and therefore long predates modern conventions of player-friendliness. This work set new standards for many aspects of the ideal model of IF, and it did so using a less capable toolset than we have today. STILL... if you're trying to enjoy this game in the here and now, then you may, as I did, find parts of it to be seriously obnoxious. Very probably, you will also, as I did, find parts of it to be uniquely enjoyable and impressive.

If the game has one major problem in its design, it's the overall lack of consistency. To me, consistency is the most essential element of puzzle design and the fundamental backstop of fairness; when an author is consistent, the player can learn his or her style and adjust thinking accordingly. It may take a few cycles of misreading clues to catch on, but usually after two or three one is close enough in mindset to make good progress. If the required perspective is not a natural one, it might be necessary to consult hints or walkthroughs a few more times on the way to completion, but I personally consider a little "spoilage" to be a good tradeoff when the alternative is abandoning the work. After all, puzzles have their own aesthetics, appreciation for them is subjective, and a work of interactive fiction can be judged on other qualities such as story, writing and deftness of implementation.

Christminster lacks the necessary consistency in many places, and it was infuriating whenever one of these bare spots brought progress crashing to a halt. The thing is: Upon further study many of what I thought were gaps in the implementation turned out to be just gaps in my understanding rooted in incorrect assumptions. These assumptions were ones that I had made for what I thought were good reasons, and it may be worthwhile to share why.

The prologue puzzle, which consists of getting into the college, is a study in miniature. In a recent Rosebush article, Victor Gijsbers illustrates the way that this puzzle embodies the spirit of exclusion animating the fictional setting of Biblioll, but I hesitate to give credence to the idea that its design was consciously intended to do so.

(Spoiler - click to show)The game does not exactly play fair here. While a survey of the environs quickly gives the experienced player the idea that it might be possible to get a feather from the parrot to use in obtaining the key, and the interaction takes pains to alert the unobservant player to the existence of a suitable missile, the coding of the two NPCs offers no similar cluing. Indeed, their algorithms give every indication of being simple, typical-for-the-era automatons engaged in cyclic activity, and little else.

Although the player is obviously invited to interact with them by their very presence, the NPCs' ASK/TELL conversation capability is sparsely implemented and doesn't add much to their apparent intelligence. After a few low hit-rate "conversations" there seems to be little else to do with them. To the extent that either shows any goal-directed behavior, it's that the constable always shows up and lingers indefinitely when you are in the vicinity of the window. The source code, graciously provided by author Gareth Rees, shows that this behavior is intentional, and it yields the strong impression that the constable is keeping a special eye on the PC as a possible source of trouble.

There is some slight hinting that the constable is interested in the magic show, but his obvious puzzle-relevant behavior implies that he prioritizes his watchman duties over casual entertainment. This, in combination with the street magician's explicit request for a small item for his trick -- along with the wholly irrelevant interaction he exhibits with any of the three smallish objects obviously available during the prologue (i.e. cobblestone, telegram and map) -- all provide consistent feedback that there is no significant progress to be had from them.

The single solution is for the PC to give her handbag to the street magician, who will refuse to use it in the trick but will provide a toffee in response. The toffee can be given to the constable, and the constable told to give it to the street magician, who will proceed to go through his routine with it before the constable eats it.

But... so what? Even if this interaction is discovered (most likely through brute force interaction), there is nothing in the prior behavior of the constable to suggest that he will simply forget all about his duties and remain transfixed while the PC goes about a bit of ballistic vandalism. The constable's part of the dialogue exhibits the same sort of detached chipperness that he has in all interactions with the protagonist, and there's nothing to signal any particular level of fascination on his part.

I'm not sure that this solution would ever have occurred to me, though I suppose I might have eventually discovered -- purely accidentally -- that a period exists in which the PC can act in the critical site unobserved. Perhaps this is a cultural difference; perhaps it would simply be unthinkable in Britain for a police officer to leave a peformance abruptly in order to prioritize doing his job. However, I agree with Gijsbers that this feels like an intentional (if not conscious) design element, which strikes me as an attempt to turn away the casual player.

Even worse, having secured the feather, the don -- who sleeps like the dead up to this point -- almost immediately wakes up after the PC takes his key. It's necessary to wait through another cycle of the street magician's patter to get to where he is asking for an object, then grab the key and pass it to the magician. The magician will cooperate in hiding it, and the don will wildly accuse you of having stolen it, resulting in the don's arrest and the removal of both the don and the constable from the scene.

This is a functionally separate obstacle, and coming back-to-back with the distraction puzzle it effectively negates any sense of victory that the player might have had in gaining the key. It almost feels like truculence on the game's part. Opening puzzles set a game's tone and style, and shape player expectations. In this case, my own expectations were shaped to expect maximum pointless friction, making finishing the game into an unappealing prospect.

I have thoroughly spoiled that puzzle because it is, it turns out, considerably out-of-character with respect to the majority of the other puzzles found in the game. (Spoiler - click to show)(... Though on reflection, there does seem to be a divide in the fairness level between puzzles that involve the environment and puzzles that involve NPCs; the latter frequently provide feedback to the player that seems misleading in nature. Perhaps that says something about the author's view of human nature?) Although there are a handful of what I would label last lousy points to be had, these are described by the author as optional, and the ending is in no way affected by missing them beyond showing a lower final score. (Note that although I am a completionist at heart, I would not recommend trying to suss out these last points at the game's command prompt. They are by far the least fair puzzles in the game, and they collectively would suggest a certain thread of perverse cruelty running through the design if they had any impact on the best ending.)

Once past the wicket gate, the game's greatest weakness is its firm commitment to offering only the mathematically minimum possible hinting. I observe that this approach seems to be typical of British games, but, in general, coupled with that style is the notion that the player should never be in a position to say that the necessary information was not presented. The high art of the mode is presenting the needed information in a manner so subtle that someone not paying close attention can easily miss it. Fair is fair, and in several cases I was simply outfoxed. However, in a couple of situations I think Rees provides too few hints to be fair for plot-critical challenges. These are:

1. The bible -- (Spoiler - click to show) Here I'm talking about both the illuminated copy found in the Chapel and the standard King James version that can be found in the Library. Obtaining the latter is one of the unfair last lousy point puzzles: The player is expected to look up 'God' in the card index to find it, and this is the only way to obtain the item. (This is an index of surnames, mind you, and variants that one might expect based on actual names for the deity are not found.) Comparison of a critical passage of the KJV to the illuminated copy's version will give the linguistically-oriented player an indirect clue about a key alchemical ingredient. Lacking the ability to read Latin -- something that presents no real obstacle in the era of online translators but required an increasingly-rare classical education at the time of the game's release -- the player must get along with some knowledge of root words to compare the English version and notice the extra phrase in the illuminated version. As a last-ditch option, one can theoretically just notice the word 'myrrheum' and assume it means myrrh, but the first time this is encountered the player is unlikely to know that myrrh can be found in the game and is probably unmotivated to try deciphering each incomprehensible word individually. Later, at the point at which the player is most likely to want to revisit the passage in-game, it's gated by a second aggravating puzzle involving the beekeeper's veil. (The problem here stems from the treatment of hat and veil as a single object in the description text, i.e. responding identically to both >X HAT and >X VEIL. Per modern conventions, this generally means that the object in question is atomic and indivisible, but I don't know how consistently that was the case in the mid-1990s. Without assuming malice, I'll just note that it's very much a "gotcha" for the player of today.)

2. The student and the professor -- (Spoiler - click to show)On first encountering this NPC, you'll see the following: "'You must help me to find my parrot,' pleads Edward. 'Just tell me which way I should go.'" In obeying your directional instructions, it's implied that he is for some reason willing to submit to your authority temporarily, but he is prone to wander off immediately after going any direction that you give. Telling him to wait or stop doesn't seem to do anything. He will respond to only a few non-movement commands, and in only one case will he actually perform the action. It's made abundantly clear that he has no desire to see Bungay, even blanching should they happen to cross paths in the aftermath of the scene in Malcolm's room, and it's also made clear that Bungay keeps his door locked and wants no visitors. It really seems to require a latent desire to punish the hapless student to even conceive of the goal of forcing him to his "supervision," since it's not possible to know that the only method of entering the gardens is through Bungay's quarters. Even after having read the solution in the walkthrough, I was grinding my teeth in annoyance trying to shepherd Edward across the map and get the timing right to trigger their encounter -- a process made even more gratuitously difficult by the need to not be there when Bungay opens his door. It turns out that >EDWARD, FOLLOW ME does wonders to smooth this process -- I just didn't guess that he would be capable of responding, and I hadn't read the introductory help text that uses the >FOLLOW verb as an example. Most importantly, there does not appear to be any way to know that Bungay's door will be unlocked after inviting in the student; I double-checked, and there is not even the "negative information" cue of there being a different sound (e.g. minus the locking action) when the professor closes his door. Parked squarely on the critical path for the game, this sequence is even more off-putting than the prologue. Further, the method for gaining access to the desk drawer, an optional puzzle yielding a pair of last lousy points, requires moving the desk. Moving desks is a pretty noisy activity -- obviously not something to do when trying to be stealthy, as the PC well knows -- and doing so gives no indication that the drawer is now accessible. Only inspecting the drawer from within the gap will reveal the possibility.

Those aren't the only problematic points in the work, but they are the ones that caused me the most grief. Every snag that I encountered arose from either a complete absence of hinting (or hinting so miniscule as to blend in with other insignificant text) or implementation that provides no relevant feedback (or sometimes misleading feedback). I won't nitpick here, but my suggestion to prospective players would be to set a time limit in advance for being stuck, and to consult the hints whenever that limit is reached; this will give you a chance to experience the best parts of the game without undergoing too much frustration.

I suppose the laundry list of complaints above may seem hard to reconcile with my ostensibly positive attitude about the game. The thing is: Christminster has highs to match its lows. Rees shows in several places that he can craft subtle, inventive and unique puzzles whose solutions are pure delights to discover and for which the hinting is unquestionably fair. I'm intentionally going to say nothing about these gems, because I want you, the reader, to be able to discover and experience them without prejudice.

To explain more fully: I realize that it's tremendously unjust to criticize Rees for not solving every problem that plagued the old school style in one stroke. This game incorporates many features that may well be firsts for the form: automatic opening of doors (which required modification of the Standard Library), use of narrative time as opposed to clock time in a story spanning both day and night, reasonably intelligent "talking" NPCs with whom realistic cooperation is necessary to solve puzzles, objects used as part of the solution to multiple puzzles, alternate solutions to some key puzzles, and more. Having inspected the solid and well-organized source code, it appears that most of what I'm calling shortcomings could be addressed by either trivial or very modest effort. I'm mostly in agreement with Jim Kaplan's review, and I think he's right that with such minor adjustments in place Christminster would be very well-regarded were it to be released for the first time today.

Though this game often falls short of my idea of real fun when considered as a whole, there is much to admire in the best craft on display, and even its flaws offer pointed lessons in what to avoid (as well as opportunities to imagine alternatives). It is indisputably worth studying as part of a review of the history and evolution of the form, and any player willing to accept its contrasts with respect to modern ideas of fairness is sure to have an enjoyable experience. I'm torn between wanting to give it 3 stars for how it plays by modern standards and 4 stars for how prominently it stands out in the context of its original release. I'm going with the latter on the basis of its substantial impact on the form; if nothing else, this is a work to reckon with.

Having been recently alerted to this remake/adaptation, I moved its inspiration up on my to-play list, and as soon as I had finished that, I loaded this up to compare.

This game isn't really interactive fiction, but it's certainly IF-adjacent, and the fact that it exists at all is pretty awesome. I have nothing but admiration for the skill and determination shown in carrying this idea through from conception to a finished game. Substantial thought was invested in how to translate the original work's mood and mechanics to a different format, and it's clear that the author had a genuine love for Veeder's source material. Thank you to Lance Campbell for sharing this, and thank you Ryan Veeder for supporting the effort.

I'm not sure how well this version stands up when considered purely on its own. Some of the nuance of the original's atmospheric writing is lost in the graphical interpretation, and the not-quite-faux grittiness that makes up the emotional backbone of the original doesn't quite come through. On the other hand, there are many novel bits here that hew closely to the original's dialog and descriptive style, and there are a few touches (like the ending credits sequence) that wouldn't be possible with pure text. There's the hint of a secret side quest of some sort -- (Spoiler - click to show)I found an item that seemed like it was supposed to be part of something bigger, but if so I never found the other parts that went with it. If you know the secret, please provide some clues by comment!

As a reminder, 3 stars counts as "good" in my book, and I would definitely recommend this game to anyone that enjoyed the original Mud Warriors. Both can be played in the time that would normally be spent on a single comp-sized work.

Monopoly is one of the most popular games in American history. There's something telling about modern culture's inattention to history in the fact that many years passed between when I was first introduced to the game as an enjoyable pastime and my discovery that the game's designer intended it to be an object lesson-in-action of the inherent flaws in capitalism as an econonomic system.

If one actually plays Monopoly according to the rules as written, it is inevitable that from among a group of players all starting on an objectively even playing field only one will emerge as the sum holder of all wealth in the model universe. That result is simply baked into the system -- there's no avoiding it, and that's what playing Monopoly is supposed to teach the player. It also teaches various skills related to improving the chances of being the player who comes out on top, though the nature of the game ensures that there's never any real certainty until late in the trajectory of a particular play session.

Social Democracy: An Alternate History feels very much like Monopoly, both in that it plays like a board game and that it has a lesson to teach. Here the lesson seems to be about the essential fragility of democracy-like government and the functional priority of economic concerns in determining societal stability. You play the animus of the SPD, a "moderate" and "socialist" party that, despite a plurality of popular support at the outset, seems inevitably doomed to lose as the country suffers a series of economic and political shocks.

I've only played Social Democracy a few times, on normal difficulty. As other reviewers note, the simulation feels well-grounded in historical research -- I have learned a surprising amount about the Weimar era just from following up on key people and events online, and the work presents an extensive bibliography that invites more serious study. Needless to say, this work does not present the History Channel style of faux history that usually paints Hitler's rise as the result of some mysterious magical power over the German people; instead it shows the confluence of many trends in interwar history -- including the history of the SPD itself -- and how they shape both the choices available and the consequences of each decision.

As with Monopoly, both strategic choices and lucky breaks compound over the course of time. As the political pressure builds, the player will inevitably come to the point where the party's mode of survival is threatened. The resolution of that threat can take various forms, each imposing tradeoffs that will shape the range of viable strategies available in later parts. Will you sponsor strong socialist approaches involving state control of the means of production and the pruning of private wealth? OK, but then the "conservative" elements of the "centrist" coalition will become enemies, and support from the communist party is likely to be restrained at best. Will you throw in with the right wingers in an attempt to prevent the far right from gaining a foothold? OK, but then you will soon find yourself an ineffectual puppet supporting policies that are in direct opposition to your base's desires, and they will react accordingly. Will you stick to your historically "middle ground" position and try to ride out the storm? OK, but you will in all likelihood find the storm to be stronger than you anticipated and your steersman skills to be insufficient to come through intact.

These are just a few of the trajectories supported by the game's system. The list of achievements and various clumps of related cards suggest that there are many more. I'm looking forward to trying quite a few of them, and seeing what unconventional strategies are supported by the system that author Autumn Chen has created. Mike Russo's comparison to one of Paradox Entertainment's grand strategy games is apt, and if you like that sort of thing then you won't want to miss this. For those looking for something more directly comparable, Chen has also just released a similar treatment of the Russian Revolution.

While I don't personally think this game falls under the label of "interactive fiction," it does fit under the broader umbrella I assign to the phrase "text games." It's worth emphasizing that the label is secondary to the thing itself, and that this thing, whatever you choose to call it, is well worth your time. I'm giving it a rare 5-star rating in recognition of its singular value as edutainment; it is surely the apex of that category for works found on IFDB.

Given the release date, slapdash cover image and minimal blurb, my first thought was that this game was an April Fool's joke, or possibly malware. It does not appear to be malware.

This unusual work puts the player in the position of an IT support worker in a nebulous corporate setting. The strange tone and disconnected gameplay makes it seem more like a half-written training tool instead of something intended as entertainment. Its concise but bland language, heavy on bullet points, smacks of LLM-generated text.

As far as plot goes, the action is split into four phases. In the first phase, the PC is given a stack of problem reports for which prioritization must be assigned. Once this is done, the PC must investigate a particular scenario more closely. In the third phase, correction of the problem must be accomplished. The fourth phase seems intended to be a kind of team review with a supervisor.

From what I can tell, the required interactions are highly scripted and are basically spelled out in each section. Starting in phase 3, cause and effect start to break down, because in order to advance it seems necessary to take an action not called for based on other information. Phase 4 is quite strange, seeming to indicate that the exercise went both poorly and well at the same time.

Other than idle curiosity, there doesn't seem to be much reason to interact with this work unless you want to be exposed to a smattering of terms and processes relevant to corporate IT support. Although this work meets the minimum functionality that would normally qualify it for at least two stars by my rubric, I still think most people are better off avoiding it entirely.

In 1993, everyone knew that "text adventures" were a dead genre, but, as has been lovingly documented by Jimmy Maher and others, a few people here and there labored in obscurity to keep the nascent art form of interactive fiction alive. Art LaFrana was one of these, someone who eschewed the semi-commercial offerings of the time such as TADS and crafted his own custom system for MS-DOS.

The Abbey, LaFrana's second work (which is not to be confused with the 2008 title of the same name by Steve Blanding), received more attention than might be expected for a shareware entry with an extremely primitive parser. A review in SPAG Magazine by Cedric Knight suggests that it was considered worth paying for even 8 years after its release. I don't think I would have agreed at the time, but in an era when so few new games that even looked like a text adventure were being produced, it may have seemed a more attractive option than it does today.

To say that the game has a parser is being somewhat generous; my own interaction suggests that it is a simple keyword-matching system that doesn't really try to parse the player's command in any meaningful way. For example, a command such as >PUSH WAGON EAST will be interpreted the same as >PUSH WAGON or even just >PUSH. This doesn't matter as much as it might because the ratio of interactable objects to rooms is alarmingly low by modern standards, and the majority of the player experience is simple room navigation.

Other reviewers stress the text's ability to evoke an atmosphere, and I have to admit that I also found this to be the case -- but I don't understand it. It's really quite puzzling; the text is "evocative" in a paradoxical way in that on first reading it seems flat and uninspired but after extended exposure a fairly vivid mental picture of the environs emerges in one's mind. I'm not sure how much I can credit the author for this; in some ways it almost seems akin to the phenomenon of hallucinations experienced during sensory deprivation. (Is this the part that I've never understood about the appeal of Scott Adams games?)

Although the game is listed under the "Historical" genre, it certainly doesn't seem to be a very accurate portrayal of its ostensible period. (For example, the language of NPCs and signage can be anachronistically modern.) That's not to mention that Atlantis seems to have been a real place in the game universe.

It does seem more intent on historical accuracy with respect to architecture and living conditions. A large number of basically empty rooms are used to describe the sights and smells of the abbey complex, and I assume that this aspect is modeled after some real historical place -- there just doesn't seem to be any other motivation to include non-functional locations such as a pigsty. I have no special historical expertise by which to judge its correctness here, but it does feel believable.

The puzzles were to me the bad kind of old school, being based largely on intuition (which might not match the author's) and/or requiring a long series of essentially unmotivated steps without intermediate feedback. The largest part of player effort by far will be spent on creating a map, which is an essential step because room descriptions sometimes omit exit listings. Since I was trying to play this on a schedule (for the People's Champion Tournament) and wasn't finding anything to savor, I resorted to a walkthrough after a few hours, and I don't regret doing so.

I was ready to like this one, but in the end I found it to be a poor substitute for a proper parser, player-friendly puzzle design and minimally-interesting story. I'm tempted to go with one star, but, as mentioned, in the end it did end up engaging my imagination, and that part was enjoyable. I can't say I'd recommend it other than as example for someone studying the earliest examples of the form. Its most lasting impact might, ironically, have come from Knight's review: Inform 6's Standard Library 6/11, released afterward, implements many of the variations of the verb "pry" that he complained were missing in this game.

In my limited experience, works by Ryan Veeder never fail to delight on some level; if nothing else his signature wit is always good for a chuckle and tends to cast a rosy glow around the memory of playing. Winter Storm Draco is no different from any other Veeder work in this respect, and it easily clears the hurdle of "good" in my evaluation.

It's not "great," though. It feels like a piece primarily created as an opportunity for experimentation. The emphasis here is on challenging standard player expectations for interface elements, especially the "opening crawl" of the timed introductory text and status line modification during the unanticipated and delightful (Spoiler - click to show)"swordfight" scene taking place in (Spoiler - click to show)a cemetery. The latter was the apex of the experience, especially coupled with the highly-abbreviated commands and very short responses that lent a videogame-like feel to the action by greatly accelerating its pace.

For an opening act, the PC becomes lost in the woods during heavy snowfall and must use boy scout/junior MacGyver skills to figure out the way home. The interaction is a little fiddly and specific here (as I recall specifically around (Spoiler - click to show)pouring liquids), which is in unwelcome contrast with the solid puzzle design.

Mystical elements begin to intrude on the scenario, which shifts the tone ever more in the direction of survival horror as the PC continues to make progress. At the climax, the PC encounters (Spoiler - click to show)a personification of the storm which may or may not be (Spoiler - click to show)a Mayan god in the vanguard of a 2012 end-of-the-calendar apocalypse. I was thrown out of the story at this point, mostly wondering how much of it was supposed to be real and how much the hallucination of a PC freezing to death. Although that kind of ambiguity can serve a story well, there didn't seem to be much in the way of revelation on the PC's part to lend any drama to the scene, and at the end I was left shrugging my shoulders.

Perhaps there's more to the climax than I experienced, but the entertainment-oriented style of Veeder's prose doesn't invite a very deep analysis, and the work's brevity contributes to its lightweight feel. This game is still definitely worth a playthrough, and I don't hesitate to recommend it as an enjoyable short play experience to the average player or a study in technique for the would-be author of action sequences.